1. Field of the Invention
The invention disclosed and claimed herein generally pertains to a method for analyzing or evaluating performance characteristics of a complex software application, based on configuration models for the application. More particularly, the invention pertains to a method of the above type wherein the costs of performance characteristics are evaluated and may be represented as numerical values. Even more particularly, the invention pertains to a method of the above type for determining the total cost of operational flows of the application, in order to identify performance bottlenecks associated with the application.
2. Description of the Related Art
A complex software application, such as is used in Information Technology management software, may include a large number of objects of different kinds which can have many bits of code and different settings. The complex configuration of the application may also be tied directly to its performance characteristics. As a result, it can be very difficult to design, understand and modify the configuration, in order to improve performance of the software, or to achieve an improved performance model.
At present, efforts to improve performance of complex applications largely rely on trial and error. Thus, after applying a particular application configuration, performance of the application is tested and measured. This procedure is continually repeated, until a desired goal is achieved. Currently used approaches may also rely on heuristics and experience. In accordance therewith, an experienced deployment engineer can apply his or her experience to improving the performance of the application, by making configuration changes. Repeated testing then ensues, to ensure that the desired performance characteristics are achieved.
Both of the above known solutions require repeated performance testing of the complex application under load, in order to ensure that required performance goals are met. For the most part, both approaches use trial and error to find the proper configuration. It would be very beneficial if performance characteristics of a complex application could be dynamically calculated for a particular configuration, before the configuration was applied to or implemented in the application.